And Now the NEWS FROM ARCO-IRIS
– Creating sustainable community, Alentejo, Portugal      ~ Sept. ‘05

Green Gathering Event – August ’05  (Great photos at http://portugal.ecovillage.org/fotos )

So descobres o melhor que ha em ti!  Quando das o melhor que ha em ti!
You only discover the best there is in you!  When the best is there in you!

           ( - poet’s corner from “Encontro de Vide Verde”)

Picture two donkeys, ours and our neighbour’s, ready to demonstrate traditional ploughing at “Encontro de Vide Verde” – the first Portuguese Green Gathering.  The smaller one, ‘Margareta’ owned by Joao our friend, neighbour and local village Elder made gentle progress up the field and back, quite predictable maybe a bit slow. Then it was our donkey ‘Romao’s turn.  Snr Joao took him first then others had a go.  But didn’t he go – more like the Flying Scotsman!  “That’s the last time I arrange an animal for a friend” said Joao somewhat puffed at the pace.

This 3-day event at the end of August was organised by the Portuguese eco-village network, a small group of young people with clear commitment whose numbers swelled in the days before to become a cohesive group.  The event brought together around 200 people, the limit set for the event, mostly young but of all ages from across the country.  You could tell that stepping onto the land again in a welcoming way was a good experience for many whose parents had given up traditional land use and ownership.

One of the delights for me was a sizeable turnout by our local neighbours from the nearby settlement – interested, curious, elder generation; all knew the land after a lifetime of memories – doors they half expect to see closed for ever on a way of life they had grown up on.

Over the three days, other local friends and contact with authentic traditional skills introduced us to earth building – we have a new example “taipa” wall made over a two day workshop from earth dug by a machine we hired for an hour* – “shisto” stone/slate wall building, “barro” a bit like adobe but a cement like mix of clay+earth mixed with water used in partition walls, and “cal” lime plaster.

* (we have a complete “taipa” shuttering kit just made for use here)

All around one could see demos and groups doing practical hands on activities.  Bread was baked from the earth-oven for everyone each day.  Food was prepared in a refitted kitchen.  As a result of the workcamps there are 3 dry toilets on the land, and the solar showers proved a great success with three large cubicles. The solar bore hole pump delivered plentiful water, filling the 1,000 litre water tower in just 3 hours or so.

The whole event was organised daily in talking circle fashion.  During the event the organisers shared the feelings and needs of the people to respond appropriately.  This collective way of doing things I found inspiring.  It demonstrated an example of relative egoless group-minded action which is organic, responsive and effective.

The results of Encontro de Vide Verde (EVV) has left us with:

-         a lot more practical know-how.  Jennie and I have spent almost a year on this land learning from observation what it will support and how to work with the people and nature here.  This event was the “putting it all together” – now we are ready as we’ll ever be to prepare and start house rebuilding, growing some food (in the right place), using natural year-round irrigation, and creating sustainable local incomes.

-         A terrific resource network.  The event has put us in touch with contacts locally and across the country – people who generally aspire to an “eco-Quinta/village” way of living (cooperative, self-reliant, sustainable) - a resource network for community oriented exchange trading?

-         A sense of a shared vision …

Esses que fazem o deles melhor , suba sobre o resto.
Those that do their best rise above the rest.

A Shared Vision

The event touched a need.  Perhaps for all the people who came.  The older neighbours could see the younger people animated, wanting to learn how to do things,  All of us everywhere have roots with the land, but for many it has been lost between generations.  Now we have a new family.  Reconnecting with our selves, with each other and with the nature is a refreshing medicine – like drinking pure spring water from out the land.

In many ways this land is giving us the medicine we need.  It can easily be lived on and shared by several independent households.  It offers an ideal opportunity for practical living for people who want to learn simple basic real life skills. 

Just nearby is a smaller Quinta where we have got to know local skilled people who are willing to help us learn and share their practical know-how and teach these practical skills to others.

The EVV event has given us a resource of people who would love to visit, attend workshops to learn for themselves the basic skills needed to start and renovate their own eco-quintas and villages.

We would like to arrange 3 or 4 workshops per year with follow on workcamps to help us rebuild the houses and work the land – a plan we would discuss and work out with residents.  So Arco-Iris lends itself to being a training centre for sustainable living.

Will the event happen next year?  Early in November this years organisers and participants are meeting to take it forward.  The Green Gathering can happen any place in Portugal that is suitable – the idea being to hold workcamps to prepare for the event, - a bit like an eco-village task force which goes a long way to building all the infrastructure needed for folks to move in and live there!

Quem isso vive para servir, servir é viver
He who that lives for service, is serving life (Pedro Ivo, Bahia-Brasil)

The land next door

“Arco-Iris” means ‘rainbow’ in Portuguese.  Most of these 10 acres are originally known as “Monte d’Espiche” – generally translated as “a string of fishes”.  Whatever we wind up calling it, the land is as good as it gets in Alentejo, possibly comparable to Kent or Dorset’s rolling hills and valleys. 

There are 4 basic ruins, some in useable condition, one of these could be a large family house or split into two, or even house with four single people sharing.  This means basic masonry walls as a starter for rebuilding which can be done in a season given practical work effort without a large budget – almost all the materials come out the ground, the expense going into the main roof beams and all the interior finishing.

The land next door is up for sale as well.  It offers at least 2 cottages, one of which has a small outhouse and which could be made into an L shaped semi-detached, on just over 2 hectares with a fine slate well.  It wont be an obvious choice for an individual buyer as it sits between our main plot and our neighbour’s who works another couple of hectares abundantly but in a very diy, one should say, untidy fashion, a bit like the Arthur Dailey of Portuguese traditional agriculture. – which is to say he is also a great source of practical know-how and unexpected gifts including buckets of fruit and veg.

On the other, north side, there is a eucalyptus wood, also for sale.  It provides an ideal parking space which we used during the event.  Jennie suggests that it offers extra potential building space, and a site for growing Flax for linen or industrial hemp, both of which will grow when euc’ is cleared. Our neighbour brought us a sample of a linen sack that had been made  from this land 50 years ago and still in pristine condition

“Nao perturbe o trabalho dos anjos no seu corpo comendo demais.”
Don't disturb the angels' work by his/her body eating too much (Rumi).

Hot Summer!

Not so bad as we thought… It was my first full Summer, Jennie’s second of the three years we’ve lived here.  It gets hot, but often there is a cool coastal breeze and sitting under the fig trees at noon was pleasant.  Siesta time makes perfect sense.  Traditional taipa houses are cool year round.  Nights were never too hot but in winter they get chilly, our wood burner in just the yurt was a boon.

Working on a roof installing solar water heating, down inland of the Algarve, in mid-August was fairly desperate.

Local resources

Odemira is a great town.  On the river Mira, which we can walk to, it’s only 5 minutes by car.  In the other direction a walk gets you to a couple of village mini-mercados, or the LIDL supermarket, and the modern estate is also nearby.  I often bike it into the village or the town, and we are sometimes seen riding in the cart with the donkey to the local bar or toward the viewing point overlooking the river flood-plain.

Everything you need, from hardware, health care, local produce, banks and lawyers is in reach.  Accessing the main roads to Lisbon or the Algarve and the airports is easy.

Even so the land is much like an island, inside the national park, protected from development with no through roads.  It’s tucked away.

Natural resources

If the place was a desert island you would be delighted to find pretty much everything you need to live well.  Water is running from the Spring.  The bore hole is 100 metres deep and water is just 18 metres below ground, from the hill top where the houses are.  There are two other wells one of which we still haven’t found so far, plus a second mini-reservoir!  The soil is good but could benefit from swales to refresh the earth with water and plenty of mulching.  Growing food almost year round is possible, in the two sheltered valleys.  Firewood is plentiful mostly from the pine wood.  Euc supplies timber for fencing and structures.  The fig harvest was unexpectedly abundant.  The 40 or so Olive trees need serious pruning to re-cultivate. There’s a couple of Almond and Sweet Chestnut – but does anyone really know their trees – and how to bud from root-stock?

Our neighbour, Eugenie, Joao’s wife, who was born in one of the houses, gave Jennie a pot of St.John’s Wort in oil, that is growing here.  She uses it as a traditional rub for aches and pains.

Late at night you often hear the Owl’s calling under night skies cascading with stars.  You will often hear barking dogs in the distance which one tolerates.

“Quando os guerreiros do Arco-Iris serao reunidos começa uma nova era na Terra.”
When the warriors of the Rainbow will be gathered begins a new era on the Earth.

About Quinta de Arco Iris

Arco-Iris or Monte d’Espiche offers potential for a small eco-village or neighbourhood for people who want to live cooperative but independent lifestyles.  It is a place that lends itself to the learning and reuse of traditional skills with modern techniques, such as permaculture, and technology such as solar and wind power.

This is likely to be necessary whatever you may really want to do; run a retreat centre, therapy courses, eco-tourism, free-energy enterprise – well who knows what?

As a neighbourhood it is naturally a part of the larger community, it doesn’t end at the gate!.  With a sustainable orientation it can be a footprint for a more sustainable society – where the decisions making is with us, and the consequences reflected in the use of our land, and it’s natural resources.

To start with you would be camping out – in a caravan, temporary timber chalet or yurt for example, while the rebuilding gets underway. 

Some of the houses can be shared or co-owned, and the model for buying in and selling is like co-housing.

Constituted and ready to go

Jennie and I have constituted an Association for buying and selling shares on the cooperative or co-housing model.  It’s been translated by our lawyer and is ready for legal registration.  Investor members receive a Resident’s Certificate which clearly identifies the plot for habitation and it’s purchase value. 

This took many months to produce, being the result of discussions with interested prospective members and several years of research.  The result is that it offers legal security for residents and a potential model for other groups – for example for people from the EVV event who we would like to support, as a way for people to obtain access to land in this country again.

Sustainable income?  Not yet

We haven’t cracked this one yet but we are getting there.  Jennie has being doing some part-time property conveyancing from her UK past experience, has given a Permaculture workshop this year and has plans for developing interest in spinning and weaving and textiles in general with the prospect of growing flax.

I’ve done part-time work installing solar energy systems and basic labouring, and we also run an internet mail-order catalogue for solar and wind kits. Meanwhile I will have completed a Plant Spirit Medicine course.  So we are not putting all our eggs into one basket.

The main prospect and challenge is to create a programme of sustainability workshops and work camps here principally to help with rebuilding work.

Over the last three years I have popped back to the UK to do my solar work, but from next year we aim to invest as much of our energies as possible to sustain ourselves from Arco-Iris.

“So nos tornamos os verdade vos corredores quando perdemos as pernas!” (Rumi)
We become only the true way when we've lost our legs! (Rumi)

World  Needs Now …

LIFE is what you make of it – or what life makes out of us.  Aren’t we all looking for something?  I say, “let it be real, let it be what Life wants, what the world needs …”

“ … what the world needs now is LOVE Sweet Love – that’s the only thing there just too little of…… not only just for me but for everyone of us…”

So let that be our common ground.  It’s what connects me and you and all the living things.  It’s what we believe and know, what brings us together, what gets created when we join our hands together.  And there’s room for all of us – all our dreams when we can just let go and let IT happen through us.

What are you feeling, what are you needing now? Aren’t these the basics for us to be living by?  And what will you do when the company water runs dry?

What the world needs… are sorted individuals, free in themselves to choose what we know is right because we accept the consequences of our actions,

… are people who love to live, crazy enough to trust, to look beyond and step out of the past, the dependency culture, a relentless path away from simply being human…

People who may be movers, shakers, stay at home types, philosophers but doers, diggers and dreamers, workshop facilitators or builders, practitioners or part-time star-gazers… just people willing to take their lead from how life wants us to be.

And when we sing the same song everything falls into place.  What causes us to look for change?  When things are no longer in their place. 

Magic happens when we do something bigger than for ourselves.  The past was built by individuals doing things just for themselves.  But the future is group-minded, co-created, bigger than ourselves.  First we had to see for ourselves what we have done to the world and now we have to see what the world wants to do with us.  We are a microcosm of all that is and there’s nowhere the grass is greener than right here now.

What do dream of doing?  A Hopi Elder once asked, “does it grow corn”? 

Arco-Iris is just a piece of land where you can grow that kind of corn, where it’s possible for humans to be and be well, because the conditions are right. To see in each other a reflection of ourselves, to see the environment as the soil for what inspires us – and as a mirror for our actions – may they be born out of truth and beauty.

A hug and with love

From Jonathan & Jennie
(Caretakers at Arco-Iris)
== > to contact us, see below …

“A vida verde é a nossa vida quando ouvimos o nosso coracao
 ao mesmo tempo que ouvimos a mae naturesa.”
The green life is our life when we hear our heart
at the same time that we hear the mother nature.

Welcome

Over the year or more we’ve met a fair few people who want out of the modern society.  We were the same and it’s taken us almost 5 years to find a place we know call home.  But it’s not the place that’s the priority.  We’ve learnt a lot about ourselves, what works and doesn’t work here, towards sustainability.  So many people looking now, it’s becoming a wave.  Some people can’t get it together and have gone back, not enough trust and not enough given, a couple joined but it wasn’t for them, not what they were looking for.  Couples with a little money or none at all but with real commitment, are a joy to be with. Others just looking for “the right place”, others still with a dream for benefiting others but not the right place or a place for sharing dreams.

So what does come first?  A sustainable society we want to be a part of grows from everyone’s dreams and includes people whether you’ve money or not.  We see ourselves just as the caretakers to help get things going.  But the land still needs to be bought, we need some investors who are likely to live here in one of the earth-built cottages.  Jennie and I can help bring in local expertise and willing workers.  Others can join as the neighbourhood grows. 

We welcome you as friends. 

Contact:

Quinta de Arco-Iris
Portas Transval
7630-066 Odemira
Alentejo
Portugal

Tlm: (00351) 961 252 349

Email Jennie ‘ecolife@oninet.pt’, Jonathan ‘ola@rainbowcommunities.org’

More info. at www.rainbowcommunities.org